LAUSR

question of who the people are should always be up for debate; in fact, democracy ought not to be understood as a particular collective of particular individuals but as that never-ending debate. Näsström, following up on this thought, warns that today’s problems will not be solved by trying to fall back on the sovereign people (in the way those calling for a Brexit referendum did, for instance). But she also thinks that her spirit-oriented approach can generate answers to questions that preoccupy contemporary theorists of “peoplehood.” Citizenship politics, she claims, should also be animated by the spirit of emancipation; it should not focus on honor and distinction (as do policies aimed at recruiting the highly skilled for a global labor market) or become a matter of virtue (by having citizenship tests for civic knowledge and model behavior). Such approaches—here is another instance of productively redeploying an Arendtian insight—might have a boomerang effect by making existing citizens seem inadequate; for if they have no skills or have not been politically virtuous, should they be regarded as second-rate at best? Still, what emancipation means for citizenship and how it could help draw the boundaries of the demos—questions that cannot be wished away by saying that we should no longer focus on sovereignty—remain elusive: Are citizens of a particular democratic state under a general obligation to enable others, such as refugees, to “begin anew”? Emancipation as an “immanent democratic yardstick” does not appear to tell us much about how, concretely, we ought to deal at the global level with uncertainty; nor is it clear how exactly we would judge political actors in terms of how well they make us share the burden of responsibility equally. Some of us simply have less time to think about the collective, and others are also less inclined to do so. Would emancipation become a de facto principle of justice here and require the redistribution of resources? Näsström herself concedes at the end of the book that her approach does not tell us what to consider right and wrong; it is more an invitation to think about well-worn questions differently. That goal is certainly met by this bold and—in the best, non-clichéd sense of the expression, thought-provoking—volume.